Ultrahigh-speed violet laser diode based free-space optical communication beyond 25 Gbit/s

Violet laser diode (VLD) based ultrahigh-speed free-space optical (FSO) system is demonstrated for point-to-point data transmission. By directly encoding the VLD with 64-quadrature amplitude modulation discrete multi-tone (64-QAM DMT) data stream for optical wireless communication through 0.5–10 m in free space, the point-to-point VLD-based FSO link allows delivering the 64-QAM DMT data at an ultrahigh bit rate of up to 26.4 Gbps. After receiving with a high-speed p-i-n photodiode, such a VLD-FSO link can provide clear constellation plot with error vector magnitude (EVM) of 8.57%, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 21.34 dB and bit error ratio (BER) of 3.17 × 10(−3) under forward-error-correction criterion. The EVM increases from 8.8% to 9.4% and the SNR decreases from 21.1 to 20.6 dB to slightly degrade the reachable data rate from 25.8 to 24 Gbit/s with transmission distance lengthening from 3 to 10 m.